Coming Home

Born in 1971, ANNABEL KANTARIA is a British journalist who’s written prolifically for publications throughout the Middle East. She’s been The Telegraph’s ‘Expat’ blogger since 2010 and lives in Dubai with her husband and two children. Coming Home is her first novel.

Coming
Home
Annabel Kantaria

For Mum

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It’s taken the support of many to get this book to publication.

My deepest thanks go to my brilliant and patient agent, Luigi Bonomi, who picked my manuscript as a winner and offered his unwavering support at every turn, and to Alison Bonomi for her nurturing support and spot-on editorial advice.

Enormous thanks to the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature (EAFOL) and to Montegrappa for making the Montegrappa Prize for First Fiction a reality. Thanks in particular to Isobel Abulhoul, Yvette Judge and the entire EAFOL team; to Charles Nahhas; and to my talented editor, Sally Williamson, and the marvellous team behind the scenes at HQ.

To the first two readers of the first draft of Coming Home, Jane Andrew and Rachel Hamilton, I’d like to say thank you for being so polite.

Heartfelt thanks to the many friends who supported me along the journey, in particular to those who believed in me long before I truly believed in myself: Sarah Baerschmidt, Arabella Pritchett, Claire Buitendag, Vicki Page, Belinda Freeman, Rohini Gill, Julia Ward Osseiran, Sophie Welch and Sibylle Dowding. Special thanks, too, to Ghazwa Dajani and Valerie Myerscough—without your help, I may never have made my deadlines.

And, finally, thanks to my family, who have stood by me every step of the way: to my parents, David and Kay, for making me believe anything was possible; to my children, Maia and Aiman, for their patience when my study door was closed; and to my husband, Sam, for his love, pep talks and fabulous plot ideas, as well as for making me laugh when I most needed to.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

CHAPTER 74

CHAPTER 75

Extract

Endpages

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

I hated seeing the grief counsellor, but I couldn’t get out of it. My teachers, unsure of how to handle me, had contacted social services and I’d been assigned weekly meetings with Miss Dawson, a sensible-looking lady to whom I was reluctant to speak. I blamed her for that: she should have known better than to tell me to think of her as my favourite auntie; everyone knew I didn’t have any aunties.

Every week, Miss Dawson arranged a couple of chairs to one side, near a window that looked out over the playing field. I could see my classmates kicking about in the drizzle. As far as I was concerned, the best bit about the counselling was that I was allowed access to the staff biscuit tin.

I didn’t have much to say to Miss Dawson, though. We’d spent the first two sessions locked in silence as I’d eyed the biscuits. Sometimes under the digestives I could see the edge of a custard cream—once, even a Jammie Dodger. But Miss Dawson didn’t like me rummaging in the tin, so I had to be sure I picked right the first time. A biscuit lucky dip.

Miss Dawson doodled flowers on the clipboard she kept on her knee.

‘Why won’t you talk to me?’ she sighed after we passed the first twenty minutes of our third session together marked only by my munching. I looked at her. How stupid was she?

‘You can’t change what happened, can you?’ I hadn’t realised I was going to shout, and biscuit crumbs sprayed from my lips. ‘You can’t stop it from happening! So what’s the point of all this?’ I jumped up and hurled my biscuit at the wall. The sudden violence, the release, felt good. ‘It’s just to make the adults feel like they’re doing something! But don’t you get it? You can’t do anything! It’s too late!’

I threw myself back into the chair and glowered at her, breathing hard. What was the point? Miss Dawson’s hand had stopped mid-doodle. She locked eyes with me but she didn’t say anything. As we glared at each other, her eyes narrowed, she chewed on the end of her biro and then she nodded to herself, her lips spreading in a little smile as if she’d had some sort of epiphany.

‘OK, Evie,’ she said slowly. Her voice had changed. It wasn’t all sympathetic now. It was brisk, businesslike. I liked that more. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a tangle of blue wool stabbed through with two knitting needles. ‘I know what we’re going to do, Evie. We’re not going to talk: we’re going to knit.’

‘I don’t know how to knit.’

‘I’m going to teach you.’

She pulled her chair over to mine, arranged the needles in my hand and showed me the repetitive movements I needed to make to produce a line of stitches. It was fiddly and unnatural, and it took all my concentration. For the first time since June, there was no space in my head for Graham. By the end of the session, I’d knitted five rows; by the following week, a whole strip.

I was eight when I learned to knit. I haven’t stopped since.

CHAPTER 2

I was making béchamel sauce for a lasagne when I found out that my father had died. It was late morning and the kitchen was filled with sunshine. Birdsong and the scent of acacia wafted through the open door; the flowers of the bougainvillea were so bright they looked unreal.

These are the details that stuck in my head as I struggled, in my peaceful surroundings, to take in what my mum was telling me on the phone. England seemed too far away; the news too unbelievable. The béchamel sauce, unfortunately, was at a critical stage.

‘He died in his sleep,’ Mum was saying. ‘Heart failure.’ She misread my silence as I continued to stir the sauce, my hand moving automatically as my brain fought to understand. ‘Darling,’ she said softly, ‘he probably didn’t even know.’

There was an echo on the long-distance line and I strained to hear her. I flicked off the burner and pulled the pan off the hob, knowing as I did it that the sauce would ruin; knowing also that what I was being told was bigger than that. I sat down at the kitchen table, the phone clamped to my ear, a heaviness in the pit of my stomach. I’d seen Dad in the summer—he’d been fine then. How could he be dead? So suddenly? Was this some sort of joke?

‘When I realised that he was, you know … dead,’ Mum was saying, cautiously trying out the new word, ‘I called the doctor. I could see there was nothing that could be done; no need to get the paramedics out. The doctor said he’d been dead for several hours. He called an ambulance to take him to the hospital. I followed in the car.’

‘There was no need to rush, really,’ she added, ‘because, well, you know …’ Her words tailed off.

Suddenly I found my voice. ‘I don’t believe you! Are you sure? Did they try to resuscitate him? Is there nothing they can do … no chance …?’

‘Evie. Darling. He’s gone.’

I’d dreaded a call like this ever since I’d moved to Dubai six years ago. There was much I enjoyed about living abroad, but the fear that something might happen to my parents lurked permanently at the back of my mind, waking me in a sweat in the early hours: freak accidents, strokes, cancer, heart attacks. And now that that ‘something’ had happened, I just couldn’t take it in.

On the phone, Mum sounded calm, but it was hard to tell how she was really coping.

‘How are you? Are you OK? Where are you?’ Now words poured out of me. My eyes were flicking around the kitchen and I was thinking ahead, my spare hand raking through my hair. I needed to know Mum would be all right until I could get there.

‘I’m back home now. They sent me home with a plastic bag of belongings. Glasses, keys, clothes, wedding ring …’ she said. There was a pause. I could imagine her giving herself a hug in her bobbly cardigan, her spare arm squeezing around her waist; the silent pep talk she was giving herself. She rallied. ‘I’m fine. Really. But there’s a lot to do. The funeral; the drinks and nibbles? All that stuff. I’m not sure where his Will is. And I don’t even have any sherry.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m coming. I’ll get a flight as soon as I can. I’ll be there tomorrow.’

Lasagne forgotten, I went to my bedroom, intending to get my passport out of the small safe I kept in my wardrobe but, instead, from my bottom drawer, I pulled out a faded blue manila folder. Tucked inside it was a pile of tourist leaflets I’d gathered over the past few months: seaplane rides, retro desert safaris; deep-sea fishing cruises, amphibious tours of old Dubai, camel polo lessons; menus from a clutch of top restaurants.

It was my ‘Dad’ folder; my plan of things to do when my father finally made it to Dubai. A year ago it would have been inconceivable to think that my father would fly to Dubai to see me: he’d always been ‘too busy’ when Mum came to visit. Six years, and not one visit from him—it was something I tried not to think about. If I did, it made me angry: father by name, but not by nature. Since I was eight, he’d not only been physically absent most of the time, but emotionally unavailable too. But then, last summer, for the first time in twenty years, he’d started to show an interest in my life.

‘So what’s it like over there?’ he’d asked. He’d brought us each a cup of tea and sat down with me in the garden. ‘How hot does it get? What do you do at the weekends?’ Then, tellingly, ‘What’s the museum like?’ Dad was an historian. If he was asking about museums, it meant he was thinking about visiting. And, after so many years of feeling like a spare—and not particularly wanted—part in my father’s life, the idea had come as a surprise to me—a welcome one at that: I’d lain in bed that night smiling in the dark. With Dad’s attention on me for the first time since I was little, I’d felt myself unfurling like a snowdrop in the first rays of spring sunshine. It had been a time of promise, of new beginnings. It had been a chance for us to put things right. Looking at the folder now, I raked my hands through my hair. I should have seized that chance then; insisted that Dad come to Dubai; told him straight out that I’d like him to come.

And now it would never happen.

I picked up one of the leaflets and traced the outline of a camel with my finger. Dad would have enjoyed riding across the sand dunes like Lawrence of Arabia, especially if there was a sundowner at the end of it. He’d have looked great in a kandora and ghutra, a falcon perched on his arm. Abruptly, I hurled the folder across the room, leaflets spinning from it as it frisbeed over my bed. Jumping up, I kicked out at the leaflets on the floor, sending them skidding across the laminate and under the bed.

‘Why?’ I shouted at the room. ‘Why now?’

Getting everything done in time to catch the 8 a.m. flight was a struggle. Booking a last-minute flight with the airline’s remote call centre had taken more energy than I’d felt I had to expend; a never-ending round of ‘can I put you on hold?’ while a sympathetic agent had tried to magic up a seat on the fully booked flight. Tracking down my boss on the golf course was even more difficult.

‘How long will you be away?’ he barked when his caddy finally handed him his phone at the eleventh hole. ‘Will you be back to close the issue?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I had no idea how long it took to organise a funeral. ‘Emily’ll cope perfectly well. I’ll leave notes; she knows what to do.’

‘Well … she’s perfectly capable, I’m sure,’ my boss said. ‘Make sure you show her what to do.’ But then he surprised me. ‘Take as long as you need … and, um … all the best.’ It didn’t come naturally to him to be nice and I could practically hear his toenails curling with the effort, but I didn’t care—with my leave approved, I sat down to write my handover notes for Emily.

My phone lay silent on the table next to me. It’d been six weeks but I still hadn’t got used to it not buzzing with constant messages from James. I’d been the one to cut him out of my life but I would have given anything to be able to hear his voice again—the voice of the old James, at least. Our lives had been spliced together for so long that my heart hadn’t yet caught up with my head. I felt like he should know about Dad, but would he even care? I rubbed my temples, then picked up the phone and dialled. He picked up on the fourth ring. One more and I’d have hung up.

‘Hello James? It’s Evie.’

I heard the sounds of a bar in the background: music, laughter.

‘Evie.’ He was surprised, confused to hear from me. ‘What’s up?’

‘Um. I just wanted to let you know that, um, my dad died last night. I’m flying to England tomorrow. For the funeral.’

James’s voice, off the phone, ‘Ssh! I’m on the phone, keep it down. Wow, sorry to hear that, Evie.’

‘Well, I just thought you might like to know. Y’know.’

‘Yes, well, thanks for telling me …’ A shout went up in the background. He was in a sports bar; a team had scored.

‘OK then, bye.’

‘Cheers.’

I shouldn’t have called. The ‘cheers’ grated more than anything. That was what James said to people he didn’t care about. I’d always felt a little sorry for them and now I was one of them. I sighed. The truth was that James really didn’t care about me; he probably never had. The only person James cared about was himself. I poured myself a large glass of wine and turned my attention to packing.

CHAPTER 3

‘Tell me about Graham,’ Miss Dawson said. ‘Were you very close? Did you see much of him at school?’

Rain slid down the windowpanes; the playing field outside looked sodden. I took a biscuit and thought about Miss Dawson’s question. Did I see much of Graham at school? Not really. He was two years above me and our social circles didn’t overlap much. Sometimes he liked to pretend he didn’t even know me. But I remembered one day when I’d been practising handstands up against the wall. The tarmac of the school playground had been gritty with tiny stones—it was the type of grit that, when you fell, dug holes in your knees, making the blood ooze out in mini fountains. After half an hour of non-stop handstands, I’d been looking at the speckles on my palms wondering if I could do any more when I realised the bullies had surrounded me, a circle of hard seven-year-olds.

‘Do a cartwheel!’ they’d shouted, their arms linked, their faces twisted. They knew I couldn’t; they knew I was still trying.

I’d looked at the floor, willing them to find someone else to pick on. My hands stung but, if I did a perfect handstand, would they go away?

The ringleader had started up the chant, the sing-song tone of her voice not quite hiding the menace that oozed like oil from her pores: ‘Evie can’t do a cartwheel!’ The others took up the refrain as they edged towards me, the circle closing in on its prey. ‘Evie can’t do a cartwheel!’

The lead bully had stepped forward. ‘Watch this,’ she’d said, turning her body over foot to hand to hand to foot, so slowly it looked effortless. ‘Let me help you.’ She came closer and I knew, I could tell by the way she approached, that, far from helping me, she was going to shove me onto my knees in the grit, kicking me and rubbing me in it until my socks stained red with blood. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

But then a miracle.

‘Leave her alone!’ a boy had screamed, leaping into the circle and breaking it up. ‘Get away from her now or I’ll kill you all!’ Graham had stood in a karate stance. ‘I’m a black belt! Now shove off!’

The girls had scattered, and he’d taken me by both arms. ‘Are you all right, Evie?’

I put down my knitting and looked at Miss Dawson. ‘I suppose we were close,’ I said. ‘We didn’t see much of each other at school. But, when I needed him, he was always there.’

CHAPTER 4

I laid my lightest clothes—a couple of cotton shirts—across the top of my suitcase, then sat on the bed, pushing myself back against the pillows. My wine glass was almost empty and I upended it now, making a full mouthful of the final dregs. It was late and my body ached for bed, but my mind was buzzing. The phone call with Mum replayed in my head. My dad was dead! Still the news, half a day on and having been repeated ad nauseam on the phone to the airline, to my boss, was too big to take in; it was like it had happened to someone else. It was the plot of a book I’d read, or a movie I’d seen. It was not my life. I knew sleep wouldn’t come.

Instead, I grabbed the house keys and stepped outside. The night-time air was fragrant with the scent of hot vegetation; of plants still cooling down from the warmth of the day. I inhaled frangipani, my favourite scent, with a top note of jasmine from the bush next door. Breathing deeply, I got a waft, too, of chlorine from the neighbours’ pool.

Slipping quietly through the gate, I waited for a gap in the beach road traffic. Cars swept past me, a blur of lights and noise after the silence of my room. Taxis carried tourists to and from their late-night dinners, bars and entertainments. Eager, sunburned faces peered out at the sights; others went past with their occupants slumped, dozing, in the back. It seemed rude, disrespectful for life to continue when my father was dead.

‘My dad’s dead,’ I said into the night air, to the road, the cars, the tourists and the taxis. ‘Have a lovely evening.’

It sounded weaker than I’d imagined. I said it again, louder, to the next car: ‘Have a great evening. My dad’s dead.’

A taxi beeped, its brakes screeching as the driver slowed, keen for another fare. I saw a gap in the traffic and ran across to the island of the central reservation and stood there, sheltered by the traffic light. Sensing I was a little unhinged, I didn’t trust myself to find another gap in the traffic and waited, instead, for the green man.

On the other side, I ducked down a side street between a beauty salon and a dental clinic and picked my way down through the lanes of fishermen’s houses to the beach. The sounds of the main road receded and soon all I could hear was the scrunch of my flip-flops on the dusty street, the sound of my own breathing and the thrum of my pulse in my head. ‘Dad is dead. Dad is dead. Dad is dead.’ I broke into a run to try to make it stop, and, not too soon, there was the beach opening out in front of me: an expanse of moonlit sand, bookended on the left by the Burj Al Arab and contained in front by a low wall. Tonight the hotel had its diamonds on: a twinkling display of lights that shot up and down its spine and belly. I stopped short, realising with a jolt that Dad would now never see this sight; that there were so many things he’d now never see. I watched through one full set of the light show then I climbed over the wall and walked towards the ocean, kicking off my flip-flops and seeking out the cold under-layer of sand with my toes.

The sight of the sea, as always, calmed me. Sitting on the last edge of warm, dry sand, I stared at the water and breathed in time with the hypnotic oohs and aahs of the waves swishing in and out. The tide was receding and each wave seemed to take the sea farther away from me, a fringe of seashells marking its highest point. I looked up at the sky and wondered what happens when you die. Could Dad see me? Was he up there somewhere now, looking down on me? Had he known he was dying? Did he think about me before he died? When his life flashed before his eyes—did it even really do that?—what did he see? What was his last thought about me?

Did he even have a last thought about me?

You should have come to Dubai, I said silently to the heavens. I wanted you to come so badly. My hands formed a steeple as if I was praying and my eyes searched for the constellations Dad had shown me how to find back in the summer evenings when we were still happy: the Plough, the Little Bear and Polaris, Orion. Tonight, as usual, all I could make out above the glow of Dubai’s neon skyline was the Big Dipper and the North Star. I needed Dad there to show me the more subtle connections between the other stars. Where are you? I asked the sky.

Would Mum be all right?

She’d sounded all right on the phone but … I shifted as a shiver rippled through me. I hadn’t spoken to Miss Dawson for years now but I still remembered the last conversation we’d had about Mum.

‘She’s like an iceberg,’ the counsellor had told me. ‘She lets you see only the top layers, the top ten per cent. If that. There’s an awful lot that goes on beneath and you’ll never see that.’ She’d noticed, then, the sadness I couldn’t hide. ‘It’s not just you, pet,’ Miss Dawson had added. ‘She’s like that with everyone. Since the accident, she won’t let anyone get close.’

And now what, I wondered. My mother was all I had left, and she was the mistress—the guardian—of The Gap. It was as if she held everyone at a distance; she didn’t want to let anyone get close to her again. We wrote each other a daily email but Mum’s emails were reports of golf scores, of choir practice and of what she was cooking for supper; they could have been written by anyone. They were information bulletins, memorandums that revealed nothing of the woman underneath. They weren’t designed to keep me close. My mum hid emotion. She didn’t reach out. She skated the surface of our relationship with prim and proper etiquette but no depth whatsoever. Mind The Gap.

In my replies, I echoed Mum’s style. We exchanged huge quantities of useless information in a literary ballet that meant little. I wrote about work achievements and new restaurants, trips to the beach and what my friends were up to. I’d tried in the past to talk about more real things; about how being with James made my blood fizz; how he looked at me like he wanted to devour me. Is this love? I’d asked Mum. Did you feel this way about Dad? How do I know if he’s The One? But the replies came back as dull as the church newsletter. ‘Your friend sounds nice, dear. Did I tell you that I’m playing a new course next week?’

By the time I was starting to sense trouble with James, I’d learned that, beyond platitudes, I wouldn’t be getting emotional support from my mum: I’d be getting a new lamb recipe and what her choir was singing for the forthcoming summer concert. In our warped relationship, it was I who took care of her.

Miss Dawson had said it was a defence mechanism. ‘Your mother’s “gap” has become a part of her,’ she’d said. ‘It helps her define who she is. She doesn’t know how to fill it.’ Then she’d smiled sadly at me. ‘You’ll get closeness one day, Evie,’ she’d said. ‘From a partner; a husband; children.’

I still felt protective of Mum, though. As an adult, I felt it was my job to look after her and the question that bothered me now, sitting on the beach, was of what lay below Mum’s gap. Had she really managed to freeze her emotions, or were they still bubbling beneath? I pushed my toes into the cold sand below the surface and wondered if, as far as Mum was concerned, Dad’s death would be the earthquake that triggered the tsunami.